Guild Wars 2

Hi Jon. Being in a production environment myself and tracking things like this on a fairly grand scale, I have to say this forum site is causing a lot of extra problems. What would be nice is to have a bug tracker, tie it into the games bug reporting and have the list posted here. This instead of sifting through tons of posts over the same issues, you’d have a populated bug tracker that only posted known issues (or at least reported in game ones). People could then respond to those bugs.

I’m sure the forum team put a lot of work into this site, but there are so many canned packages that already have a lot of this work done for you. http://www.invisionpower.com/ (the software guru uses now) has so many prebuilt features and can be skinned to match this site without much fuss. There are just so many tools you could be using to aid in this community relations bit, including tracking these bug. I whole heartly think you’d be doing everyone a great service and save a bunch of time with some pretty inexpensive community options.

JonPeters.5630:

1) I’ll spare the math but It would take our company about a year, with everyone dedicated to testing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year to get as much testing time as happens in about an hour in the live environment.

Or just one public test server. But why spend resources to do that when you can get away with using the live servers as your test suite, right?

Some of these bugs are simply so obvious and immediately apparent that one is led to think that there is no testing whatsoever prior to deployment.

Thanks for sharing such information. Working in software development myself (although on a much larger scale), I can fully understand the many issues and challenges you face.

JonPeters.5630:

How can we help?

Here I have a question: Which is the preferred channel by which we can communicate our bug reports to you?

I currently know of three ways to report bugs: Using the in-game bug report UI option (/bug), posting in the Game Bugs forum, or even submitting a support ticket (https://en.support.guildwars2.com/).

What is the option of choice to give you our feedback on bugs (i.e., which channel fits your workflow best so you can proceed to fix the bug most efficiently)?

Thanks for your effort in fixing the game. I can’t wait to see a number of events up and running that I still haven’t encountered in a non-broken state since release …

~MRA

Pedra.4381:

JonPeters.5630:

1) I’ll spare the math but It would take our company about a year, with everyone dedicated to testing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year to get as much testing time as happens in about an hour in the live environment.

Or just one public test server. But why spend resources to do that when you can get away with using the live servers as your test suite, right?

Some of these bugs are simply so obvious and immediately apparent that one is led to think that there is no testing whatsoever prior to deployment.

I have played games (with monthly fees and more resources) with these public tests servers wich had as much bugs as this game and more. Besides that, the reports there have to be checked and tested as much as others. It is my experience that this only clutter up too much and will stand in the way of progress. But lets have a look at the major dragonbash bugs.

getting achievement and reward too early cause of entering overflow: No overflow on a public test server.

Mango-food exploit, miniature exploit and lightning hammer exploit. All three are found by bad people who ruin the game for others. the kind of people I definitly don’t want on a testserver.

PoI in Divinity’s reach: ok this prolly got filtered out.

Bottom line is that a public test server cost money and resources. The reports on a public test server cost money and resources to check and verify. This game doesn’t have a monthly fee. The games with a public testing server do have that. And even those games have almost as much bugs as this game.

So public test server: waste of money, specially for a game thats sub-free.

mercury ranique.2170:

Mango-food exploit, miniature exploit and lightning hammer exploit. All three are found by bad people who ruin the game for others. the kind of people I definitly don’t want on a testserver.

That’s exactly what you should want on a test server. Unmitigated ability to try any shenanigans you want, precisely because it’s a test server and won’t impact the people on live.

A beta test server would be good. There have been way too many bugs in the past that seemed so obvious that it should have never passed QA into production. If you can’t catch them, then let us help – but without ruining the game play for everyone else in the live servers when buggy content is deployed.

MysticHLE.7160:

A beta test server would be good. There have been way too many bugs in the past that seemed so obvious that it should have never passed QA into production. If you can’t catch them, then let us help – but without ruining the game play for everyone else in the live servers when buggy content is deployed.

This would help a lot.

Another big thing I think people struggle with is knowing what is actually a bug and knowing what is intended functionality. I wonder how many bugs we could take off the list if we knew it was “working as designed”. Of course, “working as designed” in that case could spawn more discussion, but it would at least alleviate some confusion.

JonPeters.5630:

1) I’ll spare the math but It would take our company about a year, with everyone dedicated to testing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year to get as much testing time as happens in about an hour in the live environment.

So you’re telling me all the broken achievements worked in the test environment? What about bouncing attacks and clones targeting critters, summons, allies, inanimate objects or nothing at all? What about the inaccessible POI in Divinity’s Reach? What about auto-attack canceling on dodge (I can reliably reproduce this on my mesmer btw.)? I could go on for a while. I’ve developed and reviewed code myself (now sysadmin and actual software testing), whatever you’re doing so these bugs can slip through again and again, you’re doing it wrong and you need to work on a proper internal QA. We’ve all read the Glassdoor ArenaNet Review so don’t try telling us your QA isn’t broken, we’re not stupid. We can cope with the truth, but not with more lies.

I feel more attention given to bugs that are labeled as critical by the devs would be nice. Things like Phantasmal Berserker for example. It’s been almost 6 months, and this ability has not been fixed yet. There is plenty of evidence in the thread on the Mesmer sub forums to show that somethings wrong. My gripe is, someone chims in every 2 months with a fairly non-specific response on how it’s okay/no changes are needed, rather then giving us more frequent updates on the investigation. If major bugs, such as the bouncing mechanic prioritizing allies before players (turrets/clones/minions/pets) were fixed with the level of communication and speed that the ecto salvage bug were fixed, I really feel like things would go smoother for the dev team.

I appreciate seeing this post. No, it may not answer all questions, but it does show that they care. There seems to be a decreased dev/support presence on the forums recently, so things haven’t been getting addressed as quickly on here, but hey, even the forums staff needs a break too. (at least the bug forums hadn’t been neglected/unread for 5 months like the Mac forum…. Thanks again Ashley!)

Anyway, I’m sure this post wasn’t meant so everyone could post their bug experiences here, so I want to say “Thank you” to Mr. Peters for at least taking the time to address this rather than leaving the hundreds of posts hanging with nothing (or only being able to get to 1 or 2 in the time it took to write his post).

As for a test server, I’d rather have those resources devoted to making our servers better so we have less lag issues. (within the first hour of testing a new content launch, they can find and address more bugs than 8 hours of minimal player testing, besides why waste the resources, time, and money so a handful of people can test the content early)

Kyllaa.1385:

but it does show that they care.

(at least the bug forums hadn’t been neglected/unread for 5 months like the Mac forum…. Thanks again Ashley!)

They sure care… They care so much that they’ll only react with essentially contentless posts every once in a while when people are getting angry and there are too many hostile complaint threads..

No dev response in the Mac forum for 5 months? Try the dungeon forum…

Oh right, I forgot, we don’t even have a dungeon team. All we get is a response from a dev saying ‘we do care, don’t worry’ as a form of crowd control. It could be they’re preparing a new dungeon or they’re revamping the reward system, I don’t know, wanna know why? Because there is absolutely no transparency between Anet and the players. All we get are void posts from mods or devs that say absolutely nothing and just dances around the point.

If they just came out and said ‘well, nothing much has happened for the Dungeons for a while, but we’re working on something’ or ’we’re aware of your concerns and are there is a team currently working on getting new content out there’, or even ‘nope, we’ve abandoned you guys for now, tough luck, we like worthless fluff more right now’ that would be enough to satisfy people. The silent treatment we constantly get is just adding insult to injury…

For threads with 100+ replies, it would be a matter of courtesy to drop a line if this is indeed a bug or wanted behaviour and if it’ll be fixed by th end of the month. Because if I knew that these things are intended, I could stop wasting money on gems and just quit playing.

Adress the non-fanboy playerbase worries for the bugged new content constantly tossed at us while some big, old bugs are consistently ignored… by telling you’re adressing it, and there’s nothing else you can do.
Oh boy, that totally calmed me down. I think I’ll go buy some gems. That always works.

JonPeters.5630:

• Give details and don’t just assume we know. I see the following lot: Please fix the game breaking <something> bug so I can play again. Those posts are frustrating because there is nothing we can do to help that person as they have provided no details.

Arale.4207:

Things like Phantasmal Berserker for example. It’s been almost 6 months, and this ability has not been fixed yet. There is plenty of evidence in the thread on the Mesmer sub forums to show that somethings wrong. My gripe is, someone chims in every 2 months with a fairly non-specific response on how it’s okay/no changes are needed, rather then giving us more frequent updates on the investigation. If major bugs, such as the bouncing mechanic prioritizing allies before players (turrets/clones/minions/pets) were fixed with the level of communication and speed that the ecto salvage bug were fixed, I really feel like things would go smoother for the dev team.

Quoted for irony.

That is some BS right there. Your job is to support the product I have paid for. Look at Bug and class specific forums. There is some really good documentation on bugs that consistently gets overlooked or someone doesn’t take the time to reply. You need to pop into some of these and say if the issue is a bug or intended design. Stop stringing people along on this bug fix issue. Do not put it on the gamers.
Maybe if you didn’t outsource your QA you could get a faster turn around on some of these issues.

Arale.4207:

I feel more attention given to bugs that are labeled as critical by the devs would be nice. Things like Phantasmal Berserker for example. It’s been almost 6 months, and this ability has not been fixed yet. There is plenty of evidence in the thread on the Mesmer sub forums to show that somethings wrong. My gripe is, someone chims in every 2 months with a fairly non-specific response on how it’s okay/no changes are needed, rather then giving us more frequent updates on the investigation. If major bugs, such as the bouncing mechanic prioritizing allies before players (turrets/clones/minions/pets) were fixed with the level of communication and speed that the ecto salvage bug were fixed, I really feel like things would go smoother for the dev team.

What I would like to know is what more detail could we give for this specific issue. We post player stats. Enemy stats. Give the details in which the situation is reproduced. We have told them about using the dummy golems in the heart of the mists as a good place to verify. Im really not sure what more detail they could want.

jportell.2197:

Arale.4207:

I feel more attention given to bugs that are labeled as critical by the devs would be nice. Things like Phantasmal Berserker for example. It’s been almost 6 months, and this ability has not been fixed yet. There is plenty of evidence in the thread on the Mesmer sub forums to show that somethings wrong. My gripe is, someone chims in every 2 months with a fairly non-specific response on how it’s okay/no changes are needed, rather then giving us more frequent updates on the investigation. If major bugs, such as the bouncing mechanic prioritizing allies before players (turrets/clones/minions/pets) were fixed with the level of communication and speed that the ecto salvage bug were fixed, I really feel like things would go smoother for the dev team.

What I would like to know is what more detail could we give for this specific issue. We post player stats. Enemy stats. Give the details in which the situation is reproduced. We have told them about using the dummy golems in the heart of the mists as a good place to verify. Im really not sure what more detail they could want.

I haven’t played my mesmer in a few months (though he is level 80), so I don’t actually know what bug you’re talking about. The post doesn’t make it very clear.
So, one bit of detail you could offer is: What’s wrong with this Phantasmal Berserker? And the answer isn’t “Go read through several pages of the mesmer subforum.”

Jon, I appreciate what you are trying to do and if you and your team really tries to fix these bugs, please have a look here and don’t “ignore” it any longer: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmer-is-broken-Massive-bug/first#post2208916

RoyHarmon.5398:

jportell.2197:

Arale.4207:

I feel more attention given to bugs that are labeled as critical by the devs would be nice. Things like Phantasmal Berserker for example. It’s been almost 6 months, and this ability has not been fixed yet. There is plenty of evidence in the thread on the Mesmer sub forums to show that somethings wrong. My gripe is, someone chims in every 2 months with a fairly non-specific response on how it’s okay/no changes are needed, rather then giving us more frequent updates on the investigation. If major bugs, such as the bouncing mechanic prioritizing allies before players (turrets/clones/minions/pets) were fixed with the level of communication and speed that the ecto salvage bug were fixed, I really feel like things would go smoother for the dev team.

What I would like to know is what more detail could we give for this specific issue. We post player stats. Enemy stats. Give the details in which the situation is reproduced. We have told them about using the dummy golems in the heart of the mists as a good place to verify. Im really not sure what more detail they could want.

I haven’t played my mesmer in a few months (though he is level 80), so I don’t actually know what bug you’re talking about. The post doesn’t make it very clear.
So, one bit of detail you could offer is: What’s wrong with this Phantasmal Berserker? And the answer isn’t “Go read through several pages of the mesmer subforum.”

The phantasmal berserker is doing one of three things when we spawn him.
A. Doing significantly less damage than it did pre February 26th (the patch that broke him).
B. Missing one of the 4 attacks when before they all connected.
C. Missing entirely.
That is the issue we are having here. Has been around since feb. 26th. We have provided screenshots/videos and gotten two dev responses acknowledging the bug. Then nothing.
These tests have been done by players on golems in HOTM, the target dummies in LA, and mobs out in the world. In general those that have tested can agree… There is something wrong with this skill.

Sounds like they were messing with things and broke it.

They did the same thing to Ranger this patch with Offhand Training and Dagger 4 (stalkers strike) though….it could be a nerf.. you never know with Anet, they love to do undocumented nerfs to the Ranger (QZ+Shortbow)

JonPeters.5630:

How can we help?

Jon

Better communication with players about recognition and state of bugs.

Eg:
-Not leaving a thread conversation halfway through 1month ago.

-Respond to reasonably “hot” bug threads which DO provide details about bugs. (128replies, 4850 views about a bug and no response)

I suggest posting a list of current bugs recognized by Anet in the bug forums so that players can help add-on any left out ones. This will also help assure players what is recognized as a bug already. (Of course, leave out exploitable ones)

Good post Jon. Thanks for refreshing some of us and also giving insight to new players on the forum.

Here’s to “bashing & smashing” all the bugs in the coming weeks,

Cheers

RoyHarmon.5398:

I haven’t played my mesmer in a few months (though he is level 80), so I don’t actually know what bug you’re talking about. The post doesn’t make it very clear.
So, one bit of detail you could offer is: What’s wrong with this Phantasmal Berserker? And the answer isn’t "Go read through several pages of the mesmer subforum."

Because probably this isn’t the best place to talk about specific bugs. Anyway, there is a 436 reply / 26371 views thread in the mesmer forum which already had several official replies, saying things like "sorry, we can’t find the bug" (seriously), "it’s working as intended" (seriously?) and later "it’s just numbers not showing up" - which has all been disproved with actual numbers, screenshots and videos. Then, instead of fixing the berserker, they broke the bouncing attack behaviour and there was not a single official reply to this, so both of our greatsword damage skills are now broken. Plus in April 30th’s update (TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO) they changed it so

Summoned creatures and pets can no longer draw aggro from enemies that have not already aggroed on their master.

but forgot (?) clones in the process, also no official reply whatsoever. There’s lots of evidence and quite clear that this cannot be intended (I hope) since it affects you randomly, escpecially in PvE starter areas where we have lots of critters and inanimate objects, I made several videos, yet they’re making requests for MORE INFO? I mean... it’s just... I’m baffled.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SYHmS93Ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0918gFXVht8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T6nPo5jJuU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WUJuwQJH9Y
I’m not even mad that they don’t fix bugs that I know are hard to fix because of engine limitations, like teleports or leaps not always working. I can accept that, it probably requires a large chunk of their programming schedule. But this is just plain ignorant, sorry.
Then look at how long it took them to reproduce the issues with necromancer’s downed health or the auto-attack cancel on dodge, it’s laughable. I can only speak for mesmers really, but it obviously affects all classes in varying degrees. Remember the cowtapult? How long did it take them to fix this, how many (not working) fixes have been in updates and wouldn’t it have been a wiser decision to remove it altogether or provide an alternate way to get to the vista instead of wasting resources on it? Eventually some developer/designer even said "hey, let’s just remove this bs", but nobody listened, who knows. Might be well possible according to the Glassdoor review.

I think it would help if the forum software supported a few more options.

• if players could close/lock their own threads when their issue is resolved or an actual bug has been fixed, and/or if players could flag a thread as “resolved” for a mod to close them
• if players had a way to suggest a merge of threads, which mods could then merge with just one click
• if upon thread creation the forum searched for similar titles or threads and asked the player whether any of the returned threads cover their issue

All three changes would take some “weight” off the bug report subforum without additional mods patroling them 24/7.

mmm “Glassdoor Review”…interesting to see all the different opinions listed there. One thing seems to be consistent from what I read and that is the fact that there seems to be poor internal communications between all the necessary teams to make adjustments or corrections to game content.

As in all good business models, team effort with positive and open door communications is imperative to make sure your business product survives and is a viable, long-term product folks will want to purchase for a long time. Lacking effective communication and cooperation creates a problem in that good ideas and problem fixes get thrown under the bus.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I think it would help if the forum software supported a few more options.

• if players could close/lock their own threads when their issue is resolved or an actual bug has been fixed, and/or if players could flag a thread as “resolved” for a mod to close them
• if players had a way to suggest a merge of threads, which mods could then merge with just one click
• if upon thread creation the forum searched for similar titles or threads and asked the player whether any of the returned threads cover their issue

All three changes would take some “weight” off the bug report subforum without additional mods patroling them 24/7.

The only mods patrolling the forums are those in charge of deleting any post that exposes a flagrant bad praxis on Arenanet’s side.
Any real useful for the process person comes here once in a week, and of course can’t go through anything. I don’t have such a great trouble following most of the threads (at least the major bugs ones) with a little daily lecture… but I guess I’m one of a kind.

main issue with you guys is the serious lack of communication. a small we are working on it would at least calm people down.

a public testserver there u go.

bugs happen ok, but how the hell on the last 3 big updates a patch goes live and mainstuff of the patch aint working (moltenfacility, karka queen, wvw pointresets and so on)

as previous posters stated: phantasm beserker theres a 400 replies and 22k views topic and you guys just ignore it thx for that

just adding firework, yet another major thing which doesnt work. really wonder what the testdepartment is doing, clearly not testing stuff before it goes live

JonPeters.5630:

1) I’ll spare the math but It would take our company about a year, with everyone dedicated to testing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year to get as much testing time as happens in about an hour in the live environment.

This one is difficult to swallow.

There are behaviors/bugs in gameplay that certainly don’t look like things that need anything more than one player and some enemies to test. Some of these have been highlighted and mentioned in this very thread. It’s rather easy, from the player perspective, to assume that testing procedures are inadequate. It sure doesn’t help when events go live and fizzle and when some of the reported bugs have been in the game for months, perhaps even since launch in a few cases.

JonPeters.5630:

How can you help?

• Give details and don’t just assume we know. I see the following lot: Please fix the game breaking <something> bug so I can play again. Those posts are frustrating because there is nothing we can do to help that person as they have provided no details.

• If you are experiencing a bad bug likely other people are as well, make sure to bump their thread with your own details, instead of starting a new one as bigger problems can then rise to the top.

I really hope folks take this to heart, however. It’s always helpful when users provide as much feedback and information as possible — this makes it easier for the developer to attempt to replicate the error or to consider special cases and, as a result, track down potential aspects of the code that may be related. Hopefully with the number of players willing to help out others on the forum some of the threads created that are a result more of a misunderstanding or user error can be handled for you all, but in any case I know how difficult it can be to get messages from users stating something is “broken” and providing nothing beyond that.

This goes for in-game reports, too.

very long dev post.
In half the time it took to write that, you could have at least addressed most of the major bug threads here and in the class subforums……and garnered a lot more goodwill with the player base.

We all know your job is tough…..but it doesn’t really excuse just how major bugs can go months without acknowledgement, let alone a fix…..and that bugs that work in the player’s favor are fixed almost immediately. Its a real problem if your team is so busy fixing exploits that it has no time for anything else.

i think the first reply has the right idea…..the current process doesn’t work, maybe the bug report system in-game could be improved

velestra.9415:

a public testserver there u go.

I said a PTR would be helpful before, but meanwhile I doubt it. They can’t let you test new content there, so most of the bugs would slip through anyway (achievements, exploits and stuff). What’s way more problematic is that they must know about many of the other bugs (see above), they should also know the details and many issues can actually be easily reproduced. Others lack in detail and/or can’t be reproduced, but they fix neither so that’s not an excuse. A PTR wouldn’t help with that.
If they think the forum is a good place to report bugs, ok. I see that real issue trackers are harder to use and probably overstrain most people. Our users are like trained monkeys when it comes to computers as well. Imo it’s way easier to find and merge duplicates in a tracker so people don’t think their report has been deleted, but ok.
Anyway, I’m only surfing this forum in my spare time while I’m at my 40h/week fulltime job and I’m also active on some other platforms, and even I can keep track of the reported issues. There’s about three pages of bug reports per day normally (minus what’s removed by moderators, 667 pages after nine months), several more shortly after patches. I’m sorting out more than that in my lunch break, not to mention what a dedicated employee could do. There’s more than 300 people working at ANet, we have several CCs in here or whatever they’re called, dunno how many people in their QA department, so it’s pretty ruled out that they don’t know about all the bugs, they have them in their internal bugtracker and they’re prioritized for sure, they just don’t fix them. Of course we don’t know how many bugs they fix that aren’t mentioned in the update notes at all, but it really makes you wonder how many actual developers capable of fixing real bugs (not designers, artists and so on) they have and how broken the game/engine already is.
If the Glassdoor review is halfway correct, they face a severe lack of documentation, a lack of communication between teams and a high fluctuation in the QA department, so probably nobody has a real project overview.
That’s how ambitioned projects usually die. What ANet does isn’t rocket science, they’re just a software company with an ungrateful but huge community. If we worked that way, we’d be dead by now because of our limited customer base (and the loss of money, I’m maintaining an accounting system).
What I also don’t understand is the lack of communication. Yeah, in case of the illusionary berserker for example there have been replies, but those were... lacking at best. It would have been sufficient to say that it’s a confirmed bug and watch the videos to see that there’s something indeed broken. For most other bugs, there isn’t a reply at all, even if it would just take thirty seconds to check a thread with SEVERAL HUNDRED REPLIES and say "that’s a bug, we’re working on it, won’t make it into this month’s update though". And when there are that many replies, you SHOULD REALLY work on it.
The right click interaction issue also is a sad story and a good example. That wasn’t even a bug, yet it took them how many months to deal with it? That should have been a simple executive decision. But probably the one who cared wasn’t the one who decided so the one who needed to fix it wasn’t told to fix it. Or whatever. You just can’t work that way.

Weekend \o/

PS: we (mesmers) have a really comprehensive list of issues here. There’s also lots of details, but most should be self explaining. If there are missing details, nobody ever asked for it. They’ve also been reported in the bugs forum of course, but that thread even is a sticky, so you’d think they noticed it. The number of fixes over the course of nine months is so small that it’s almost negligible. Half of it being small number adjustments or tooltip changes. Most issues aren’t that important, some are. Instead, new bugs are introduced. The balancing is based on broken skills, which means they have to rebalance sooner or later, twice the work, unless they don’t fix bugs at all. If skills are left broken for balancing reasons, not even the tooltips are adjusted most of the time. It’s a complete lack of certainty for every serious player. Some ANet official announced a bugfixing patch for for the end of last month in the necromancer subforum, but not even their low health on downed has been fixed properly (see here). It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.

Have you ever considered offering an incentive program for players hunting bugs and filing complete and useful bug reports?

Just off the top of my head, if your Dev Team finds that a player bug report provided them with particularly useful or insightful information that led to an important bug fix, that player could be contacted and offered a discontinued item skin or collectable of their choice as a reward. There are certainly enough rare skins and items from Mad King, Wintersday, etc. that some players might either want or want to sell.

Sort of like a Crimestoppers pay-for-information setup. Call it BugStompers.

Oh – and for those calling for a public test server, it’s probably a pointless waste of resources. Most other public test servers I’ve seen are very sparsely populated and are really only used immediately prior to a content patch by players either looking to demo the new content (rarely filing any bug reports) or by players looking to find exploits in new content (obviously never filing bug reports). There are some that will diligently look for bugs, but it’s pretty much not worth the effort.

EVE has had decent luck with implementing an official volunteer bughunter program on their public test server – but the same effect could probably be achieved here using something like the incentive program mentioned above.

Anet seems determined to grind out new game content over fixing any bugs as far as I can see. I’ve been keeping up on the Mesmer one and just decided to stop reporting what I already reported months ago, not to mention other players actually offering up videos showing the bugs.

But we have new content almost every month… So new content seems to be winning the race with the accountants that pay Anet’s bills, along with new gem store content to earn more profit for the investors.

All of that will fall into a sink hole sooner or later due to poor decisions on spending to support development teams to fix things in the game from launch that still are “bugs.”

I feel like there is no attention given to bugs at all, every 30 days approximately we get living story content released and still no bug fixes nor replies to our questions.
Lots of bugs have months in game and still haven’t been fixed such as crashes, lag, bugs nerfing classes (izerker), etc.

johnpoc.8732:

I feel like there is no attention given to bugs at all, every 30 days approximately we get living story content released and still no bug fixes nor replies to our questions.
Lots of bugs have months in game and still haven’t been fixed such as crashes, lag, bugs nerfing classes (izerker), etc.

Didn’t someone post an article about that, not long ago?
Mainstream for mmorpg developments is that: small teams, saturate playerbase with new untested content, keep a big bunch of them from noticing the quality of the alredy released permanent content.
But hey, Arenanet is using a business model based on benefits exclusively from pay-able new content. The fanboys are paying the staff’s salaries, so the new skins and minis’ bugs shall be insta-adressed/fixed as soon as the gemstore opens. The rest of us are contributing with nothing but bug reports, we should be thankful we can even play! Since we’re not paying a monthly fee, that is.
(Just clarifying, there’s some sarcasm there)

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll spare the math but It would take our company about a year, with everyone dedicated to testing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year to get as much testing time as happens in about an hour in the live environment.

Perhaps, I am reading this wrong. Does mean they are testing it in the live environment or we are testing it in the live environment?

So, they do some QA but rely mostly on live environment testing? This quote doesn’t make sense to me …. especially coming from a compliance background (not tech related).

A statement like that would never fly where I work … maybe I’m reading this incorrectly.

They said they’re testing on a closed beta system. Which probably isn’t even hosted in the regular datacenter but in their office, at least they also said several times that some live issues only come up because of the delay/lag they don’t have when testing.
He just tried to say that 200.000 players find more bugs in ten minutes than a few beta testers could find in a month. That doesn’t explain bugs like the inaccessible POI though. That one means: zero testing. Updates to one subsystem (class) can always break things that seem completely unrelated, especially in a complex software like an MMO. Okay. But there doesn’t seem to be a structured and well documented testing / QA process, unlike they’re telling us (the statements can be found in the dev tracker).